As IF Times

link Democrats boycott Coke, Walmart over voter ID laws | Washington Examiner.

Maybe they’re right.  Where is the proof that people have nothing better to do than to go out on polling day and fraudulently vote for their favorite guy?  The very idea of it is insulting.  We constantly hear of voter apathy, so anything that can be done to make the process easier should be encouraged.  Heck, you may as well vote a couple of times while you’re there for good measure.  Let’s face it, bureaucracy is strangling society at every turn.  Maybe the entire notion of carrying ID for any aspect of our lives can be dismissed entirely.  The multi billion dollar sink hole which is homeland security can be wiped out overnight.  Gone forever will be border lineups, invasive questions and churlish officers.

Perhaps this same approach can be applied to other aspects of our daily lives.  Immediately we can think of airline travel.  Instead of the layers of bureaucracy that are presently associated with air travel today, including ticketing, airport security, passport applications etc etc, why not just revise the process into a first come, first served format?   It could be like waiting for a bus; no one needs to jump through all the ‘security’ hoops now required of all air travellers; just show up and board with a ham sandwich and a Big Gulp.

This novel notion can be applied to  work and education as well.  When someone applies for a job, is it really necessary to present all kinds of paperwork evidencing vocational and college bona fides?  Who would lie about this kind of thing?  The job application process can be made much easier by emphasizing the personal interview.  In fact, this humanizes the process rather than choosing people because of some abstract scholastic scores.

Think of how easy life would be.  When you attend sporting or entertainment events, you wouldn’t need evidence of having purchased a ticket, you simply stroll in and get the best seat.  When you leave a restaurant, you wouldn’t need to show any kind of ownership chit to the valet parking attendant.  You just tell him you’d like the convertible Mercedes.  At dry cleaners, the retrieval process is sped up immensely.  No longer will it be ‘no ticky, no laundry’, you just ask for some shirts in your desired size and color.

Over time, we’ve become a society hopelessly dependant on labels and tags.  We have come to accept all manner of restrictions and rules on our activities because apparently, it serves the greater good. Anyone who owns a phone or used a computer is plugged into ‘the matrix’.  There’s very little that can’t be known about anyone with only a few clicks of the mouse.  Maybe we should push back at all of the invasive ID tags imposed upon us.

Getting back to the voting process, it’s obvious to everyone that a bit of modern tweaking can improve the entire election process.  Logically, they could contract out people to go and gather votes as if it were a bottle drive.  These canvassers can then dump off their baskets of votes at centralized stations for counting.  What could go wrong?  If we want to be even more 21st century, people could just click to vote for their candidate from the convenience of their smart phone or computer.  What could go wrong?

link More than half of Americans back Obamas Koran apology | Reuters.

When you first read this headline, the natural response is, HUH??  That is until you read further into the article and find out that sample size is a whopping 1143 people…online.  That’s not even a population size large enough to cover Sandra Fluke’s activities at Georgetown.  The average person will not figure this out.  The headline will stick with them and before you know it, the narrative is that half of the population of over 300 million people in the U.S. are supportive of Obama’s apology for the burning of someone’s religious books.   This is the same crazed logic that brought us Climate Change, (nee Global Warming) because someone thought some penguins were missing.

Reuters has not historically been a dubious news source, but when they print outright laughers like this story, it casts skepticism on all of their news stories.  It is unclear when they made the decision to move into the tabloid business.  I guess this particular headline sells more than “Insignificant sample of online geeks think Obama apology is a good idea”.   This headline is the political equivalent of a “Lindsay Lohan Goes Wild” story in the entertainment hype pages.  This so called conclusion cannot even be characterized as a leap of logic, it more closely resembles someone being fired from a cannon into the next county logic.

If statistics are to be deployed in support of some conclusion, then the authors should at least be bright enough to use some valid ones.   Or at least have more respect for the intelligence of their readers.   Interestingly enough, during the 2008 Presidential election, a convincing 96% of Black voters pulled the lever for Obama according to Politico.   This same survey showed that 54% of young white voters also voted for Obama.  To this day, many will deny that these statistics are any indication of racially influenced voting.  I suppose there’s always that 4%.  This same leap of logic is being used to characterize the Occupy Wall Street crowd as the “99%”, a narrative that some math challenged people actually buy.

We conclude then, that journalism schools do not have a mandatory introductory course on statistics as part of their curriculum.   If ‘journalists’ insist on quoting statistics to support their arguments, this should be a minimum requirement.  Otherwise, just stick to telling stories using creative writing skills.  At the very least, there should be disclaimers at the end of stories similar to what you see attached to the end of pharmaceutical commercials wherein all the possible risks are listed.  In the case of news stories, they can say something like, ” statistics quoted may or may not have any connection to the intended conclusion, they are only added to imply validity”.